The most effective seems to be "search." It accounts for over 40% of all on-line ad dollars. From what I've been told by web experts, it seems to provide the best ROI in most cases. (Having said that, let me assure you that all data in this area is somewhere between "best guess" and bullshit.)

The question I have is this: Is search really advertising?

In the broad sense, all paid messages done for commercial purposes can be considered advertising. However, advertising as we know it in the common vernacular has certain characteristics:

It is purposefully created.

It tries to improve our opinion of the advertiser.

If you accept these characteristics of advertising, it is hard to determine whether search can be defined as advertising.

Search results are sometimes created purposefully (e.g., meta-tags for paid search), but mostly they are "generated" not created.

Its power to improve our opinion is downstream i.e., it relies on the strength of the actualad (landing page, website, etc.) that we don't see until after we leave (click out of) the search engine.

The best analogy we have for search in the offline world is the Yellow Pages. In the Yellow Pages, we distinguish between a "listing" and an "ad."

As a matter of fact, Yellow Pages listings often conclude with the following type of statement 'see our ad on page 345', acknowledging the difference between a listing and an ad. In search, however, we often make no such distinction, and consider the listing itself to be advertising. It may be advertising in the broad sense, but is it an ad?

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."